Karl Rove is a true believer, as the subtitle to his memoir
suggests, in a fighting faith. Much that vexes our current politics
flows from the fact that he is an exemplar rather than a singular
case.

"Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight"
pretty much completes the recollections of those who surrounded
George W. Bush during his eight-year presidency. Only former Vice
President Dick Cheney's book still is to come from those within the
innermost White House circle. Rove, of course, was the political
architect of all Bush's successful campaigns, as well as those of
dozens of other Republican candidates.

In the extensive news coverage leading up to Tuesday's publication,
much has been made of his admissions of tactical error - failing to
push back against charges that the administration misled the
country into the Iraq war; botching the post-Katrina response;
predictable score-settling with prominent Democrats. More
interesting are the vague and largely unexamined origins of Rove's
conservatism. As he tells it, he holds the views he does largely
because he grew up in the mountain West, where self-reliance is
prized, and because when, as a 10-year-old Denver boy, he put a
Richard Nixon sticker on his bike, a little girl down the street
whose family supported John F. Kennedy beat the heck out of
him.

*****

His own family was utterly dysfunctional - his
father, the book suggests, was apparently a closeted homosexual who
ultimately divorced his mother, a habitual spendthrift who stole
her children's legal support payments. Only as an adult did Rove
discover he was adopted. He was a champion debater in high school
and became so deeply involved in electoral politics that he never
took a degree, though he was just a couple of classes short. Later,
when enrolled briefly at the University of Texas, he would acquire
a lifelong admiration for William McKinley because his mastery of
new electoral technology would usher in decades of GOP
dominance.

For a man who repeatedly used "family values" and "faith-based"
considerations as wedge issues in his campaigns, there is in this
book nothing of how his own two marriages failed nor why he remains
unchurched. Still, it's clear that his great disappointment was the
failure of "compassionate conservatism" - defined mainly as
privatizing Social Security and Medicare supporting faith-based
social services - to accomplish a fundamental electoral
realignment. For that, Rove blames the cowardice of the
Republicans' congressional delegations.

His is a Manichaean view of American society - divided irremediably
between dark and light, allies and enemies.

Rove the debater is at his dodgiest when he defends the Bush
administration's break with generations of American moral tradition
and jurisprudence by adopting torture as state policy. First, he
attacks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the congressional Democrats
for denying their knowledge of the step: "Can we really expect CIA
agents to carry out war policies if they fear that leaders of one
of the two major political parties will punish them for good-faith
efforts to protect America?" (There's a classic straw man, since no
such retribution has occurred, despite considerable pressure from
the Democratic left.)

Then, Rove goes on to argue that the Geneva Conventions on the
treatment of prisoners are not applicable to "Al Qaeda, since they
protect only the combatants of signatory nations." In other words,
it's OK to torture some people, but not others. Rove also dismisses
the objections of conservative legal scholar Jack Goldsmith, who
headed the Office of Legal Counsel under Bush, by arguing that
while his legal arguments have to be taken seriously, "(T)hose of
us serving in government at the time - in the aftermath of 9-11 and
when intelligence was collecting 'chatter' from terrorist
operatives that indicated another attack was imminent - this debate
was not academic." Waterboarding, for example, is not torture -
according to Rove - because "the president never authorized
torture," though he did approve waterboarding. Besides, again
according to Rove, waterboarding - for which convicted Japanese war
criminals were hanged after World War II - worked and extracted
vital information from Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. The latter point is disputed by many inside and
outside of the intelligence community, and we'll probably never
know for certain, because the tapes of their interrogations have
been destroyed. (Now, why do you suppose that happened?)

*****

Even Rove's most highly publicized admission of
error - though not quite an acceptance of responsibility -
comes with an explanation. As so many of the news stories based on
leaked copies of "Courage and Consequence" have pointed out, Rove
considers his singular shortcoming the failure to mount a push-back
against those who charged the administration had misled the country
into going to war in Iraq by falsely asserting Saddam Hussein's
possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and by
alleging his complicity in Sept. 11, 2001. One reason for the lack
of rebuttal, the author writes, "was that we felt it was beneath
the dignity of the president to refute such outlandish charges."
Moreover, "many people in the Bush White House were simply worn
down by the Iraq debate. ... Our critics pounded us relentlessly.
And the public saw silence as a plea of nolo contendere. With a
complicit media that refused to subject the Democratic attacks to
even the most mild fact-checking, many Americans eventually came to
side with the administration's adversaries on this important
question. ...

"The charge did what its critics had hoped. It weakened the Bush
presidency. And those who led the charge (Rove singles out former
Vice President Al Gore and Sens. Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid and John
Kerry) did grave damage to their country's ability to win a war it
was hotly engaged in. They must have known at the start this would
happen, but it was a price they were willing, even eager, to have
their nation pay."

*****

Rove has produced - that seems the right word -
a curious memoir, clear in its antipathies and in its constrained
but obvious affection for the Bush dynasty, particularly George W.
The why of those antagonisms and affections is more obscure. Can it
really come down to the geographic accident of birth and a feisty
little girl down the street? Perhaps - or, maybe both are fruits of
a largely unexamined life lived entirely within the hothouse of
contemporary electoral politics.

The great architects of recent electoral change - unmentioned here
- such as industrialist Mark Hanna, who elected Rove's admired
McKinley and ushered in 35 years of Republican preeminence, or Jim
Farley, the construction magnate who put together Franklin
Roosevelt's enduring New Deal coalition, were men of vast
experience, as well as political acumen.

It's worth wondering just how much of our current political
discontent grows out of the dominance on both sides of the aisle of
men and women, like Rove, whose only serious experience of American
life is politics itself.

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